Right after I promised to be back on the garden beat, I got the nasty cold or flu virus that’s been floating around North of Denver. Colds are like Volkswagen Beetles or baby bumps — once you have one, darned if you don’t see them everywhere. People who had this plague were everywhere: My best friend’s husband. The lady behind me in the checkout line at Safeway. The bottom of my lunch-hauling bag was full of cold remedies for a good two weeks.

Then, of course, there was that little election thing. No word yet on whether the President-elect will be ripping up part of the White House lawn to do a food garden, but if he does, you can likely expect Kitchen Gardeners International to be first with the story — and to continue lobbying the new Eater in Chief.

It’s always been part of the master plan for this Fort Collins botanical and community garden. They’ve raised about $80,000 in cash and in-kind donations toward their $200,000 goal. In December, they’ll put in the irrigation system. The plan for the “Garden of Eatin’,” forwarded to me by garden Director Michelle Provaznik, is CRAZY fabulous. Click this link to see it. You can tell on the plan what the fruit trees will be: AP are apples; PL are plums; CH cherries, PE pears, etc.gardenofeatinplanonly
It was vegetable gardening in Colorado Springs that got Michelle into horticulture in the first place, and behind her calm, cool, organized veneer, I can tell she’s giddy with excitement, especially about the prospect of espaliered pear trees along the garden’s west fence. You don’t see a whole lot of espaliering goin’ on here on the Front Range, but our high-altitude, sunny climate is a natural for it, and Michelle saw a lot of it this tree-training technique during her time in California. It involves tying the tree to conform to a narrow space and hug a wall or other barrier. Or in other words, maximum yum in minimum space — a sort of vertical, edible bonsai on a large scale — and gorgeous to boot.

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What else will be in the gardens? Four big vegetable beds (Michele hopes to work with students in CSU’s food crop programs to work out a rotation plan); cherry and apple and plum trees; table and wine grapes; an outdoor teaching kitchen with a high-btu burner for canning classes; an herb bed and a potager, or French kitchen garden, next to the kitchen space; a pumpkin and sunflower bed among the apple trees (combining plants that delight kids); a “perennial vegetable” bed (asparagus, garlic, onions, and maybe rhubarb); a small fruits garden with raspberries and strawberries and currants and gooseberries (oh my!) and a pollinator garden just so there’s a great big neon sign to lure bees, butterflies and hummingbirds (Michelle is confident that once they find the area, they’ll discover plenty of reasons to hang out and pollinate the fruit trees and tomatoes).

There’ll also be an international garden and a “continental U.S. garden” — the latter bed shaped like the United States and featuring regional specialties from other areas of the country. that can be grown in Colorado. Three pergolas will be draped with vines including hops — to honor donations from New Belgium Brewing Company and O’Doull’s.

I think Michelle’s proudest of the fact that the majority of the food grown in this 3/4 acre will be donated to Larimer County food banks — and that once the teaching kitchen is built, the health district and CSU Extension will be able to teach healthy cooking and food preservation classes there.

Dirt Date: My Denver Post colleague Lisa Kennedy has been covering the Starz Denver Film Festival all week. If you love gardening AND film, don’t miss “The Garden,” at 9:30 p.m. this Friday in room SCF11 at the Starz Denver Film Center on the Auraria campus in Denver. Here’s the festival’s description of this powerful documentary that Lisa tells me has passed its first hurdle on the way to an Oscar nomination.

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“Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s [no relation to Lisa] impassioned documentary focuses on a fourteen-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles—and the pitched battle for its survival between a group of mostly immigrant farmers and the well-connected developer who’s determined to raze it. …” The box office, in the Tivoli building, opens an hour before the film day of each day. For more on the festival, click here. To see a clip, click here.